Unity Dropping DirectX/Direct3D 9 Support

[starshipeleven]

Losing Windows XP (to malware, deprecation and final EOL) was a big hassle.
I upgraded my PC at some point, getting a new vid card, only to find out my PC was still running like shit anyway. Windows 7 is like an aircraft carrier or a Soviet administration, it needs too many gigabytes to do the piles of digital paperwork it does.
If some of you had the recurring hundreds $$$ and the will to spend them on more and more upgrades just so you could play games that needed $shit version 3.0 or 3.2 instead of $shit 2.1, good for you.Then, browsers expanded to fill all RAM and CPU leaving me with the most powerful PC I've ever had but worthless at what used to be the only reason to use a PC (games).

You're young (and/or poor). I've dumped "the most powerful PC I've ever had" 3 times before CPU stopped increasing performance significantly, and all this circus grinded to a halt.

FYI, that's why people bought consoles back then. All games made for it would 100% run on it for ever, no upgrades, no OS, no bullshit.
Sure no mods and "community patches", nor some kinds of titles anyway. But back then modding wasn't a thing as it is now, anyway.

Nowadays hardware obsolescence on CPU is pretty much unheard of (thanks Obama!), and you only need to buy a new GPU every 2 years, so it's a great time to be a PC gamer.
And also nowadays consoles are far too much PC-y to be worth looking at (at least imho).

If there are games coming out that are OpenGL 1.2, single-threaded (not counting I/O threads if any), that uses a few hundreds megs of RAM and aren't too big on storage space, I'll be very interested

Sounds like the average Android game. (not OpenGL 1.2 but similarly total shit GPU required, embedded stuff is outrageously crappy if compared to PC).

[DRanged]

Debian stretch 64bit with wine-staging 2.11. WoW runs great now with D3D11 and so does EVEOnline.
Wine devs are making now good progress on D3D11.

[grok]

Nowadays hardware obsolescence on CPU is pretty much unheard of (thanks Obama!), and you only need to buy a new GPU every 2 years, so it's a great time to be a PC gamer.
And also nowadays consoles are far too much PC-y to be worth looking at (at least imho).

Ah yes that's an argument that does work very much as well. Many people on i7 920 or 2500K upgrading only this year, if that.
Some GPUs are long lived as well (seems you can use a 7970 3GB, or GTX 670 2GB, or 750 Ti 2GB to this day if you're ok with it. if not for the GCN 1.0 support on amdgpu in "when it's done" state, which has prevented me getting an R7 240 or Pitcairn GPU if so I wanted)

Youth or not I do some "man yells at cloud" expression. I do think PC games are console-y if you ask me : even Steam on Linux is a bit like Xbox, PS3/PS4, more so than the games on Windows 98 and XP were.
Cost isn't really worse than it used to be, except new low end hardware tends to suck. I suppose we're going to see bunches of old corporate or consumer desktops and workstations with i5 2410, i7 2600, i7 3770 etc. show up. (which you can then jury rig with a fan or two, case change, GPU, hard drive etc.)

Else Nintendo Switch after price drop would likely be a very good gaming platform.